Bennetts Associates’ Metropolitan Police training centre in Hendon derives its colouring and crispness from police uniforms

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Gareth Gardner

Bennetts Associates has completed a new Training and Operations facility for the Metropolitan Police Service at its Hendon site, creating a contemporary, flexible learning and working environment.

The north London facility, which once contained twenty-five outdated buildings, has been consolidated into just two, comprising more than 21,500 square metres of educational and operational space, a gym, and multi-user hall alongside a state-of-the-art shooting range and specialist crime-scene wing.

The main educational building is conceived as a three-storey rectangular volume with a continuous ribbon of office-type accommodation wrapping around several internal atrium spaces. The south-west corner of the rectangle is cut away to create a strong visual link between the central atrium and the external parade ground, where passing-out ceremonies take place. Events for up to six hundred people can be accommodated through using the building’s atrium as an extension to the multi-user hall on the ground level.

Externally the palette of materials is designed to recall the cleanliness and clarity of the traditional Metropolitan Police uniform, using a combination of black hand-worked zinc and silver anodised cladding to shape a strong set of lines around the façade. Bright yellow is used sparingly to mirror the colour of a medal on a policeman’s lapel.

Alastair Bogle, project architect at Bennetts Associates, said that ‘meeting the changing needs in modern policing in London has made this an exceptionally interesting project to deliver. The Hendon facility has been used by the Met since the 1930s and now enables over 1200 students to be trained at any one time, thereby supporting the growth of the Metropolitan Police Service now and in the future’.

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